Assistant Professor, Cornell University

Geographic Crosswalks

Peter’s dissertation analysis and related working papers assess neighborhood choices in the context of varying educational geographies. The following two data crosswalks link Census tract centroids (2010 boundaries) to school districts and to the nearest within-district elementary school by year.

Crosswalk 1 (download): Stata datafile (.dta) of school districts (1970 and 1990) linked to census tracts (2010). Matches made using the spatial join feature in ArcGIS. Districts matched when tract centroid falls within school district polygons. District boundaries from 1970 were constructed manually from historical Census records. District boundaries from 1990 are accessible on the Institute for Education Sciences website.

Crosswalk 2 (download): Stata datafile (.dta) of elementary schools (1997-2014) linked to census tracts (2010). Matches made using location point data and the “geonear.ado” package in Stata. School NCES IDs can be merged to information from the Public School Universe file of the Common Core of Data.

Note: Each crosswalk is password-protected. Please email Peter at peter.rich@cornell.edu to obtain the password. This step ensures that he knows who is using the data so that he can send documentation and updates as needed.